Srs bzns linguistics: "your ass" as a special pronoun
Welcome to this month’s newsletter!
I’ve got the print layout for Filling Your Worlds about 80% done; I’m just waiting on the illustrations to be finalized, then I can drop them into the text and fix any issues caused by reflowing. (I’m using Affinity Publisher, and now that I’ve figured it mostly out, I really like it.)
Linguistics: a very serious science
Linguistics, as a field, generally falls under the humanities, but some subfields cross over to the social sciences (sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics) or to physics (the acoustics end of phonetics). In the 1940s–50s, when the field was coalescing from dialectology and philology and all the grant money was available for “hard” science and not so much for “soft” science (which, unfortunately, hasn’t changed), there was a shift toward making linguistics a “real” science, i.e., more like the hard sciences. Today, you’ll find Bayesian phylogenetic analyses of language families, professors calling their research groups “labs,” and all manner of computer-assisted research, including large language models, waveform analysis of speech, and statistical analyses of word frequency.
But is linguistics all serious business, all the time?
lol, absolutely not. We love talking about and analyzing colloquial language, which includes internet language (many papers were written on Twitter usages, RIP), slang, and how the youth talk.
I got a suggestion from a reader to write about some of the more off-beat linguistics articles out there, and I’m going to start with one that’s about the anaphoric properties of “your ass.” What the hell does that mean? Let’s get into it.
A universal pronoun in English?
Beavers and Koontz-Garboden published a paper in 2006 (free full text here) in which they analyze the way the noun phrase “(possessive) ass” is and can be used in colloquial English. They propose that it’s basically a pronoun that can be used to stand for any grammatical person in any case. Their analysis relies on examples taken from internet forums, blogs, and Usenet. They build their argument around government/binding theory and the blocking principle (the idea that a piece of a sentence can be in the way of something else such that it prevents a particular structure from forming via movement).
A grammatical person refers to the first, second, or third person. If you don’t remember this from English class, first person is “I, we,” second person is “you,” and third person is “he, she, it, they.” A grammatical case is (in English) nominative (the subject), accusative (the object), or genitive (possessive). Other languages have more cases, like dative, prepositional, ablative, and instrumental, but since this is about English, let’s stick to the first three. Anaphora (anaphoric) is the property of language which allows one word or phrase to refer back to something else. It’s what makes pronouns possible, basically.
They lay out few examples where people use “my/his/her/their ass” as the subject of a sentence (“My ass gave her the money”) and the object of a sentence (“I told his ass I needed the money”), then write this sentence, which always makes me giggle when I read it:
Your ass is not simply a possessive pronoun + NP (PossNP) construction since, primarily, it is semantically non-compositional. This is clearly evidenced by (1c), where it is the members of the band who know how to jam (not their buttocks) and likewise the speaker presumably handed the ten dollars to the woman with his hands (not his buttocks).
They conclude that it’s a “peculiar type” of pronoun (and not a possessive noun phrase), because it can appear in both reflexive (X-self) and nonreflexive contexts, as in He bought himself/his ass a car and His ass bought his girlfriend a car. It also does slightly odd things when it’s the subject, because it’s allowed to take a reflexive object, as in the example they make up: His ass upset himself (*him), compared to His broken back upset him (*himself). (The asterisk here means “is not acceptable.”)
Even though your ass looks like a possessive noun phrase, they state, it’s actually more like a reflexive pronoun, if a kinda weird one. They then get into Kiparsky’s blocking principle and pronoun typology, which, to summarize their summary, states that there’s a hierarchy of pronoun specificity, and a more specific pronoun can block a less specific one from being used. A reflexive pronoun is more specific, because it depends on a specific reference, so it blocks a regular pronoun from being used. Your ass can be used with or without a specific reference, which is interesting and unique (in English).
They take a look at the semantics of it next to explain why it behaves the way it does. Their first argument would not be out of place in a sociolinguistics journal: It’s only used in particular social settings, because it’s deemed “inappropriate” in many social settings, “(e.g., in a reputable academic journal).” They don’t spend any time on this line of argument, unfortunately, leaving it merely at ‘there’s other stuff going on.’ Instead, they spend several pages on negative and positive connotations of the phrase, where in a negative use, the speaker signifies that they see themself as superior to the referent, but in a positive use, the speaker expresses awe or envy of the person being referred to.
In summary, the short phrase your ass looks like any other possessive phrase, but it actually works more like a pronoun with some weird properties (when it’s being used in the nonliteral way, of course).
There are a few other articles I’d like to look at in future newsletters, but I’m not planning on making this the majority of the newsletter. I just think they’re neat.
Application to writing
Applying this to writing is a bit of a stretch, but you could use this principle of a very flexible pronoun to invent a slang phrase for your work.
Until next time!
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